William Gardner Smith

William Gardner Smith (February 6, 1927 – November 5, 1974) was an American journalist, novelist, and editor. Smith is linked to the black social protest novel tradition of the 1940s and the 1950s, a movement that became synonymous with writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Willard Motley, and Ann Petry. Smith's third book, South Street (1954), is considered to be one of the first black militant protest novels. His last published novel, The Stone Face (1963), in its account of the Paris massacre of 1961, "stand[s] as one of the few representations of the event available all the way up until the early 1990s".
Smith was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, of African-American descent. After 1951, he maintained an expatriate status in France. However, due to his various journalistic and editorial assignments, he also lived for extended periods of time in Ghana, West Africa. In the final decade of his life, he traveled to the United States to visit family and friends and write about the racial and social upheaval that was occurring there.
Some of Smith's journalism and reportage from this period was published in various media outlets in France and Europe. Some of it was revised, re-adapted, and published in Return To Black America in 1970. Smith, who spoke fluent French, was a frequent contributor and guest on radio and television programs in France, where he was considered an expert on the political struggle, civil unrest, and racial tension in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Smith was diagnosed with cancer in October 1973 and died just over a year later in Thiais, in the southern suburbs of Paris, France. He was cremated and his ashes were interred at the columbarium at Paris's Père Lachaise Cemetery.
Life and work
Smith was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Edith Smith. In 1934 his mother married Douglass Stanley Earle. According to the Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB):
In Smith's senior year, his high-school principal helped him secure a part-time position with the Pittsburgh Courier. Smith graduated from Benjamin Franklin High School with honors in January 1944 at the age of 16, the second highest student in his class. After graduation Smith began working full-time as a reporter for the Pittsburgh Courier, but in January 1946 he was drafted into the Army. He was sent to Europe, where he was assigned as a clerk-typist in occupied Berlin, Germany. It was this experience that inspired his first novel, Last of the Conquerors, published in 1948 when Smith was only 21.
Discharged from active duty in 1948, Smith attended Temple University and continued working as a journalist with the Pittsburgh Courier. During this time he married his high-school sweetheart and had begun working on his second published novel, Anger at Innocence (1950). After a short stay at the Yaddo Foundation in Saratoga Springs, the recently married couple left the United States for France in late 1951. There they became part of a large African-American community of artists and writers living in Paris including, most prominently, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes among others.
Smith and his wife believed that a move to Europe might help their troubled marriage, but that was not to be. Increased financial burdens, his wife's difficulty learning a foreign language, and their struggles as artists in the displaced milieu of a community far from family and home, led to the couple's divorce. Despite these serious financial and spiritual difficulties, Smith continued to write while leading a bohemian existence in the Latin Quarter.
In 1954, Smith's situation improved with the release of his third novel, South Street (inspired by his childhood in the black neighborhoods and ghettoes of Philadelphia), and his hiring by the Agence France-Presse (AFP). In the following years, he served as a foreign service editor and correspondent. He also was a director of AFP in Ghana until the fall of Nkrumah in 1966, after which Smith continued as an editor and special correspondent of AFP in various countries.
His next book The Stone Face, published in 1963, would be his last published novel. Smith had begun work on it in 1961 when the war in Algeria proved to be an explosive situation that had exacerbated passions in France. This novel evokes the anti-Arab racism that Smith was witness to both in his daily journalistic work and in the streets of Paris. Kristin Ross, in her book May '68 And Its Afterlives, points out that The Stone Face is one of the earliest published eyewitness accounts (albeit in a fictionalized format) of the Paris massacre of 1961.
Smith's status as a foreigner and expatriate marked him as an insider and outsider in two cultures, the United States and Europe. By the early 1960s, as a black American working in a foreign land and witness to injustice on two continents, the stakes were raised for Smith in the composition of this novel. It pushed his capacities as an artist, writer, and journalist to their limits. In this novel and his subsequent journalistic writing and reportage, Smith testified to the social, political, and cultural happenings of his adopted country as a way to explore and address everyday racism in the United States. In France, Smith was considered an expert on the racial situation in the United States, especially after he published a report in 1967 on the revolts within American black ghettos.
Smith remarried on October 31, 1961, to Solange Royez. Their daughter, Michelle, was born in 1963, and a son was born in Accra, Ghana, in 1965. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1969. In 1971, Smith married Ira Reuben, a native of India. Their daughter Rachel was born in 1971.
Selected bibliography
Major works
Last of the Conquerors (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948; London: Gollancz, 1949).
Anger at Innocence (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950; London: Gollancz, 1951) – Malheur aux justes, Club Français du Livre, 1952, 293 pages, translated by Jean Rosenthal.
South Street (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1954).
The Stone Face (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1963); new edition, with an introduction by Adam Shatz, published by New York Review Books Classics, 2021,
Return to Black America (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970) – L'Amérique noire, Paris: Casterman, 1972, translated by Rosine Fitzgerald.
Periodical publications
"The Negro Writer: Pitfalls and Compensations," Phylon, 11 (Fourth Quarter 1950): 297–303.
"European Backdrop," Pittsburgh Courier, January 5, 1952, p. 3.
"Black Boy in France," Ebony, vol. VIII, no. 9 (July 1953), pp. 32–36, 39–42. – Article deals with life of Richard Wright in Paris over a span of seven years.
"The World's Most Famous Nude," Art and Photography, vol. VIII, no. 10–94 (April 1957), pp. 14–15, 43–45.
Further reading
Amine, Laila. Postcolonial Paris. pp80-89
Bush, Joseph Bevans. "On Re-Calling William Gardner Smith: Writer and Friend," Philadelphia Tribune, August 30, 1977, p. 21.
Bone, Robert A. The Negro Novel in America, revised edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), pp. 167, 176–178.
Bryant, Jerry H. "Individuality and Fraternity: The Novels of William Gardner Smith," Studies in Black Literature, 3 (Summer 1972): 1–8.
Fabre, Michel. La rive noire, essai, André Dimanche Éditeur, 1999 (French)
Gayle, Addison (Jr). The Way of The New World: The Black Novel in America (Garden City, N. Y.: Anchor Press, Doubleday, 1975), pp. 239–247.
Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2001).
Hannah, James. A Black Writer Found Tolerance in France, and a Different Racism
Höhn, Maria. GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
Schatt, Stanley. "You Must Go Home Again: Today's Afro-American Expatriate Writers," Negro American Literature Forum, 7 (Fall 1973): 80–82.
Schraufnagel, Noel. From Apology to Protest: The Black American Novel (DeLand, Fla.: Everett-Edwards, 1973) pp. 47ff.
Stovall, Tyler. Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Mariner Books, 1998).
References
External links
Archives de France-Culture : Les nouvelles guerres culturelles aux Etats-Unis – Identités afro-américaines, émission du 25 août 2006, avec William Gardner Smith en 1970 et Angela Davis.
FBI file on William Gardner Smith
1927 births
1974 deaths
Journalists from Philadelphia
20th-century American novelists
African-American novelists
African-American journalists
20th-century American journalists
American male journalists
American emigrants to France
American expatriates in France
American male novelists
Deaths from cancer in France
20th-century American male writers
Novelists from Pennsylvania
20th-century American non-fiction writers
American male non-fiction writers
Burials at Père Lachaise Cemetery
United States Army soldiers
20th-century African-American people
Temple University alumni